Campania Archives - Page 4 of 5 - attheitaliantable.com

December 24, 2012 by Gina Stipo Leave a Comment

Panzerotti – Chestnut Ravioli

christmas chestnut pastry Growing up on the east coast, we always spent the Christmas holidays with my father’s family in Brooklyn. Driving up from DC the day after Christmas, we’d arrive in time to for dinner. The house was decorated and warm with lights and garland, every dinner was festive and dessert always included a big platter of fried pastry: struffoli sprinkled with tiny colored confection balls and long strips of crunchy dough drizzled with honey; but my grandmother’s specialty were her chestnut ravioli. Chestnuts come from her hometown of Montella, in the mountains of Campania just to the east of Naples, and she prided herself on this delicious Christmas specialty. Flavored with cocoa and various liquors, chiefly the southern Italian strong tasting Strega, it was never my favorite as a child, so I politely ate the chewy fried pastry around the filling and hid the dark, strong chestnut filling in a napkin.

Luckily I grew up and learned to appreciate how luscious a little alcohol can make a simple filling of ground chestnuts, cocoa and sugar.

These are simple to make, beautiful to serve, piled high on a plate and drizzled with honey, and delicious to eat. Buon Natale!

Panzerotti (fried chestnut pastries)

Dough:

3 cups flour

3 tbsp sugar

2 teas baking powder

3 eggs

3 tbsp vegetable oil

2 tbsp milk

¼ cup brandy, Cointreau or Grand Marnier

Mix the dry ingredients together, add the wet ingredients into the center and mix thoroughly, adding additional flour if too sticky. Wrap and refrigerate for three hours.

Filling:

The base of the filling is chestnut, but if my grandmother couldn’t get enough or they were too expensive she mixed them with ceci, or chickpeas. You can either get fresh chestnuts and boil and peel them, or canned chestnuts, which definitely cuts down on time. If using canned or jarred nuts, make sure there is no sugar added, just chestnut.

The liquor that’s added is just enough to help the mix puree smoothly into a paste and can be a combination of anything you have, some sweet, some not.

3 cups chestnut meat

1 cup dark cocoa

1 cup sugar

1/8 teas cloves

¼ teas cinnamon

Zest from one orange

Liquors: Cointreau or triple sec, brandy, amaretto, anisette, Strega, rum

Take a small amount of the dough and roll it onto a floured surface. Cut 2 inch rounds with a cookie cutter, moisten the edges and place a large spoonful of the filling inside. Fold the panzerotti into a half moon shape and firmly secure the edges with the tines of a fork. Heat peanut oil to 350 degrees on a candy thermometer and fry the panzerotti in batches. Drain on paper towels. Dip in granulated sugar, sprinkle with powdered sugar, or drizzle with chestnut honey.

October 2, 2012 by Gina Stipo Leave a Comment

Pasta of Campania

Quick! What are everyone’s two favorite Italian foods??!!

I hear you, I hear you shouting “PIZZA AND PASTA!!!”

Well you can thank the Napolitani for that, because both pizza and pasta originate in Naples and weren’t widely known, eaten or cooked outside of the south until after World War II. American GI’s are credited for increasing the awareness of pizza, but pasta is a different story.

Dried pasta has long been a staple of southern Italy but is a fairly new addition to the northern Italian diet. Northern regions like Tuscany, Lombardy and the Veneto have always relied on bread, polenta and rice for their starches, with fresh egg pasta made on Sundays and holidays. As southern Italians moved north to find jobs in factories after WWII and brought their favorite food staple of dried semolina-based pasta with them, it began to be sold and eaten in the homes of northern Italians as well.

Where two generations ago few Italians north of Rome ate dried pasta, now Italians everywhere don’t feel complete unless they’ve had at least one plate of pasta a day. Large pasta companies like Barilla and DeCecco, among others, opened massive factories in the north to keep up with the demand.

But if you truly want to understand pasta, you must go south to the area around the Bay of Naples.

Gragnano, along with the neighboring town of Torre Annunziata, has been a pasta-making center since the late 1800’s and was designed with pasta in mind. Located on the eastern side of the Bay of Naples under the shadow of a volcano, the constant sea breezes and humidity were ideal for drying pasta. The fertile valley of Vesuvius, with its volcanic soil, was ideal for growing durum wheat, and the fresh water from the mountains combined to produce the perfect pasta. On the banks of a river lined with mills for grinding durum wheat into semolina flour, the streets lie perpendicular to the Sorrento coast to take advantage of the constant sea breezes that were used to dry the strands of pasta. There are many old photos from the early 20^th century showing racks and racks of long spaghetti lining the streets and balconies, drying in the open air.

It’s a more hygienic operation these days with the pasta being made and dried indoors, but on an artisan scale. Using time honored methods for extruding and drying the pasta, the pasta of Gragnano differs dramatically from modern industrially produced pasta in two important ways: adherence of the sauce and chewiness.

Modern pasta factories use Teflon dies to extrude pasta shapes, which makes the pasta slick, allowing sauce to slide off rather than adhere. The artisan method utilizied in Gragnano uses original bronze dies which are inherently rough, catching the dough and texturing it, which makes the pasta hold onto its sauce better.

The other important difference is the drying time. In modern factories, where time is money, pasta is dried in large ovens for 2-4 hours, depending on the shape and thickness. In Gragnano they understand that long, slow drying results in denser, more elastic pasta, which when cooked has a satisfying chewiness. Drying times can be anywhere from 10 hours to 7 days. Here time isn’t money, it’s quality.

Gragnano has several artisan pasta factories that you can tour to experience first hand the hot and humid environment necessary for making excellent pasta. The valley of Vesuvius is no longer used to grow wheat, they turn to vast fields in Canada for that. But the local water and the pride in Campania’s pasta culture and history combine to offer a product which has no equal in the north.

September 12, 2012 by Gina Stipo Leave a Comment

Taralli – the pretzel of southern Italy

We called them “Grandma’s pretzels” and they were little rings of fennel flavor dough, alternately crunchy and chewy. But the official name is “taralli”, and if you go to southern Italy you see them everywhere. Flavored with fennel or pepper and occasionally almonds, they are great with a glass of wine and sliced salami. Often taralli are made with lard which makes them flakey, or olive oil which gives them more of a crunch, taralli are gaining popularity in Tuscany and regions up north.

Grandma’s pretzels were both chewy and crunchy, which you don’t get in store bought versions. Shaped into small rings or knots, she made bags of them and brought them out for cocktail hour, which was taken seriously in my grandfather’s home.

I recently decided to pull out her recipe when my niece, Nastasia, was visiting and we had a nice little salami we were going to slice for dinner. It gave me the chance to pass it on to the next generation. We had so much fun making them that she carefully wrote the recipe to replicate them at home.

They’re easy to make. You begin with a simple bread dough, give it minimal time to raise and then roll them out and shape them. Thirty seconds in boiling salted water and then 20 minutes in a hot oven and you have a lovely, homemade pretzel.

Taralli – southern Italian pretzels

6 cups flour

1 envelope yeast, dissolved in 1 cup water

2 teas salt

¼ cup fennel seed (or 2 tbsp black pepper)

¾ cup olive oil

Combine flour, salt and fennel seed, make a well and add the water and yeast and oil. Mix together until it forms a stiff dough, then knead until smooth and elastic, about 5 minutes. Cover and let it rest 15 minutes.

Bring a large pot of salted water to the boil.

Take a quarter of the dough and roll it flat with a rolling pin. Cut ropes and roll them thin, less than 1/4” and 3” long; form each piece into a ring and secure. When you have your work surface filled, pick them up and plunge them into the boiling water for 30-60 seconds. Pull them out with a spider or slotted spoon onto paper, then place them on parchment paper on a baking sheet and bake at 400’ until lightly browned.

Allow them to cool before putting them in plastic bags to save. Serve with any Italian cured pork product. Buon Appetito!

August 20, 2012 by Gina Stipo Leave a Comment

Summer Eggplants and Fried Peppers

Even though eggplants can be found all year long, they’re actually a summer vegetable and August is when they’re the most abundant. I remember when the only eggplant you could find was dark purple, oblong and pear-shaped. Then suddenly a wide variety of eggplants started appearing in the stores and range from small, white eggs, to mottled green and white balls, to long, thin fingers. Whether pale or dark purple, round and fat or long and skinny, the diversity of shape, size and color is truly astounding.

Originally from India, eggplant is a member of the nightshade family, along with tomatoes, potatoes, peppers and tobacco. The raw seeds are bitter and contain a form of nicotine.

Make sure you pick eggplants that are firm to the touch; the long,thin ones tend to have less seeds. Eggplant is like a sponge, made of cells filled with water and air. Salting eggplant causes the cells to release the water which collapses them, making the eggplant less of a sponge to absorb oil.

Eggplant is more commonly used in southern Italy where it seems almost to be used as a meat replacement. They have a myriad of ways to incorporate eggplant into a dish and they all seem to begin with frying it.

One of my favorite antipasti in the dog days of summer is fried eggplant and sweet Italian peppers, served with fresh mozzarella. If you have some nice cherry tomatoes, you can toss those in the hot oil as well. Then serve the whole thing with some fresh mozzarella, a good loaf of bread and a bottle of Primitivo or Negroamaro from Southern Italy. Buon Appetito!

Fried Summer Peppers, Eggplant & Tomatoes

2 lbs sweet Italian peppers, tops broken off & seeded

2 small eggplants, rectangular cut w/ skin on

1 pint cherry tomatoes, halved

Extra virgin olive oil

2 cups peanut oil

1/4 cup olive oil

Salt

Mozzarella

Heat the oils in a large sauté pan, about 1 inch deep and fry the peppers in batches until they are cooked and their skins are lightly browned, tossing and stirring every so often to cook evenly. If you can’t find the long sweet Italian peppers, you can use red bell peppers cut into thick slices. After you’ve fried all the peppers and placed them to drain on paper towels, add the eggplant in batches and cook until nicely browned, removing them to paper towel. Make sure the oil is very hot before adding the eggplant, you want them to seal and fry, not absorb oil. Be careful to drain the vegetables over paper, not on top of other pieces of eggplant or pepper. Add the tomatoes to the oil and fry for a few minutes, until their skin starts to crinkle, then drain on paper. Toss all the vegetables together, sprinkle with sea salt. A flaky salt like Maldon or Cyprus is really good and gives a nice salty crunch that pair well with the oily vegetables. Serve as an antipasto with the freshest, best mozzarella you can find.

A note on frying: it’s important for this recipe that the oil is very hot when you put the vegetables in, but not to the smoking point. Adding the vegetables lowers the temperature so you may need to allow the temperature to come back up before continuing with other batches.